[R] <-

[Patrick Burns]

I rather object to this sort of solution.  One of the strong points of
the S language is lists which allow items that belong together to be
in a single object.  It's hard to believe that the results of a single call
to a function don't belong together.

R without an accent (or at least with my accent) would attach the list:

res <- myfunc()
attach(res)
summary(a)


Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

David Brahm wrote:

>Damon Wischik <djw1005 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>  
>
>>One thing I would find very handy is a shortcut for
>>  res <- myfunc()
>>  a <- res$val1
>>  b <- res$val2
>>Something along the lines of
>>  list(a=val1,b=val2) <- myfunc()
>>but I don't know what the right syntax would be or how I'd go about
>>programming it. Any suggestions?
>>    
>>
>
>I agree this would be handy!  And appealing to Perl folks who are used to:
>  Perl> ($arg1, $arg2) = @ARGV;
>I couldn't figure out how to do it with replacement functions (see Prof Brian
>Ripley's <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> reply), but here's another approach:
>
>multi.assign <- function(x, ...) {
>  mycall <- match.call()[-2]
>  mycall[1] <- call("list")
>  mylist <- eval(mycall, x)
>  for (i in names(mylist)) assign(i, mylist[[i]], parent.frame())
>}
>
>Here's an example:
>  R> myfunc <- function() list(val1=7, val2=c(5,5))
>  R> multi.assign(myfunc(), a=val1, b=val2, d=val1+val2)
>  R> a
>     [1] 7
>  R> b
>     [1] 5 5
>  R> d
>     [1] 12 12
>  
>